Does your company have the checks in place to find cybersecurity weaknesses? The subtleties of a company’s vulnerability to a cyber attack can easily go undetected. At MTEC we have routine network assessments to keep an eye out for anomalies and assure all softwares are updated. During one of these checks, our employee Dylan Schiller discovered a piece of malware on MTEC’s internal GIT server. Fortunately, it was discovered quickly and swiftly removed. Even the most seemingly impenetrable systems can remain sensitive to an attack if proper precautions aren’t taken. 

This incident is a prime example of the importance of both keeping all of your company’s software as up-to-date as possible and making sure you have a plan in place with the necessary steps to take if an incident such as this occurs within your company. After the network breach was identified at MTEC; Dylan, former System Administrator Alex Oliver, and Computer Science intern Maranda Dominguez began to create an Incident Response Report. This report outlines the necessary processes to identify the origin of intrusions as well as the required steps to ensure other systems have not been compromised.

Following the procedures outlined in this report, further cybersecurity vulnerabilities were uncovered, but had fortunately not been taken advantage of by outside parties. With this newly gained knowledge, information system patches were implemented to decrease the likelihood that an event such as this would happen again in the future. This malware discovery was a valuable lesson to all of us at MTEC and demonstrated that you can never be over-prepared when it comes to the security of your company’s IT infrastructure.